A young man, Brook Jonathan Trye, aged 24, was in love with a waitress. But she dumped him. So he sent her hundreds of text messages saying he was dead. He said he wanted to know how she would feel if he died.

Then he pretended to be a food inspector. He used official-looking stationary and sent a letter to a local paper saying that the restaurant where the waitress worked had killed someone by serving bad chicken. They were being investigated for murder!

He blamed the death on a real infection, the "flesh eating bug" necrotising fasciitis. To provide further proof, he included pictures of the supposed victim, which he downloaded from the Internet.

He was sentenced to seven months in jail.

The image above is from the Troma film: Poultrygeist: Night of the Chicken Dead (2007), which the New York Times accurately pegged as a perfect example of the genre of "satirical sexploitation zombie chicken gross-out musical extravaganza."